Psychokinetic (PK) Agents

What if hauntings don’t always come from the dead? In this episode, Jenn and Cortney dive into the strange world of PK agents—people who may unknowingly generate paranormal activity through intense emotional or psychic energy. Is it a haunting… or is someone in the room causing it?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Welcome to Paranormal Coffee Hour. We're your host Jen and Courtney. And we're pouring you a strong cup of the weird, the wonderful, and the woo-hoo. We're back, bitches. So on this episode of Paranormal Coffee Hour, we're gonna be talking about poltergeists and PK activity. So, Court, what do you think, or what do you really know about PK or psychokinetic activity?

SPEAKER_01 0:54

I know that they were trying to do a lot of investigating on it science-wise.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Yeah, it has been something that has been studied quite a bit. So when we talk about PK activity, what we're talking about is activity relating to changing the state or position of a physical object using only the power of the mind.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Oh, that could be creepy and fun.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Essentially, you're moving objects with your mind. It's also known as telekinesis. And some of the studies done have found evidence suggesting that certain forms of emotional expression or even shifts in your emotions may facilitate PK-related activity. That makes a lot of sense. So, you know, when you get really bitchy, shit's gonna go down like Carrie. Oh, I love that movie. Yeah. Wouldn't it be interesting if women, you know, when you hit like menopause, right? Suddenly the PK activity kicks in and you're like, I'm taking you fuckers down. I mean, why waste it in your teen years? Exactly. So a PK agent is a person with psychokinetic activities that are potentially tied to them. Unfortunately, Courtney, you are not a PK agent.

SPEAKER_01 2:03

No, I was just discussing this off-air with Jen. I have a lot of emotional stress once in a while, and I don't get a PK agent. I'm fascinated by the fairies. I don't get a fairy. Like, what am I fucking doing wrong here? You just have to throw shit yourself. Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

And then I end up having to clean it up. So a poltergeist is defined by Webster's dictionary as a noisy and unusually mischievous ghost, a spirit that's capable of making mysterious noises, such as rappings. The term itself from poltergeist comes from German roots. Polter derives from the verb poltern, which means to rumble, to make noise, or a bluster. And the second half, geist, means spirit, apparition, or ghost. We often see poltergeist cases characterized by a series of apparently out of the ordinary physical phenomena, such as the sudden movement of objects without any apparent force acting upon them. And rapping, not like Tupac, or knocking sounds that do not seem to have any clear source. But they're really not a ghost, they're more of an aggregor. That could be true. Yes. And there is still questions as to, you know, if it's a poltergeist just related to the fact of the human that it affects and it's like that extra energy, or is it actually a spirit unto itself? And that's part of what we're going to be talking about today. So to describe the activity in poltergeist cases, the term recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis or RSPK is used. The term reflects the tendency for the phenomena to occur unpredictably and repeatedly over time. And see, that unpredictability makes me think about like the PK agent and their emotions.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

That would be my luck, too, would be the unpredictability. It'd be like, no, what are you doing? Not now.

SPEAKER_00 3:49

So a lot of what I have come to believe, and what a lot of scientists who are studying this, and yes, there are legit scientists studying this, keeping this idea of RSPK in mind or the recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis. Poltergeists are person-oriented phenomena rather than spirit-oriented. So the recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis theory opposites that poltergeist activity is not caused by ghosts or spirits, but by the unconscious mind of a living person. This person, often referred to as the agent, is typically undergoing significant emotional stress or turmoil. The RSPK theory suggests that this emotional stress can trigger spontaneous psychokinetic events. These events are recurrent or recurring because they happen multiple times, often over weeks or even months. They are spontaneous because they appear to occur without the conscious control or intention of the agent. All I can think is, oh, I'm so sorry, I just threw that at you. Right.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

And every time you say spontaneous, I'm waiting for combustion.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

In this context, the disturbances associated with poltergeist activity, such as moving objects or unexplained noises, are seen as physical manifestations of the agent's emotional distress. The agent is typically unaware of their role in the activity, and the events often stop when the agent's emotional state improves or when they are removed from the environment where the activity is occurring. That's interesting to me.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

Yeah, that nobody puts two and two together, like I'm very upset, shit's flying, until somebody on the outside goes, So what's happening?

SPEAKER_00 5:23

Which is a lot of what we do with our paranormal team is look at the trauma that might be causing the paranormal activity. But what I found interesting was the idea that removing them from the environment can also cause this to stop.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Well, I mean, it makes sense if your environment is awful.

SPEAKER_00 5:39

That's true. Or it triggers. The RSPK theory suggests a strong link between emotional stress and psychokinetic activity. The idea is that these intense emotions, particularly negative ones such as fear, anger, or frustration, can trigger spontaneous psychokinetic events. This is considered an unconscious process, with individuals typically unaware of their role in the activity. There's several real life cases that seem to support this theory too, and that's something we're going to talk about shortly here. One of the most famous is the Enfield poltergeist case in the UK in the late 1970s. In general, this activity centered around two young sisters experiencing significant family stress at the time. The disturbances, which included moving objects and unexplained noises, were thought by some investigators to be a result of spontaneous psychokinesis triggered by the girls' emotional turmoil. Another example that we'll get into more in a moment is the case of Tina Rush, who was an American teenager at the center of a series of poltergeist disturbances in the 1980s. Again, the activity occurred during a period of significant emotional stress for Tina, leading some researchers to suggest a psychokinetic explanation.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Well, and a lot of these cases happen in the 70s and 80s. Still happens, but you don't get a lot of these big cases anymore, I feel like.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

I don't think you're getting the media attention.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

I think it's not a bad thing to get behavioral or mental health help anymore. Right. As much as it's not a stigma as much as it was then.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Right. And you know, are we seeing less of it because more people are getting mental health help? So who's studying it? Well, we have a couple places that are very well-known places that are studying it. The Psychical Research Foundation, or the PRF, is at Duke University in North Carolina. And they're part of the Rhine Research Center. They're studying this. Also, Oxford University in England is studying it. In 1911, physicist Sir William Barrett first suggested the human side to poltergeist when he examined a series of early cases under close scrutiny. So this has been something that's been kicked around since 1911, that these things are occurring because of human beings, not because of external spirits. Now, he believed this because he noticed that phenomena in these cases tended to focus around a certain person, usually occurring whenever this person was present or nearby. If the moving of objects and strange noises seemed to focus around a central person, then one explanation to consider is the possibility that this phenomenon on a large scale form is psychokinesis. Because the phenomena often manifest spontaneously and are not willfully controlled by the central person, this large scale PK is thought to act on an unconscious level. So those are kind of like the steps he took to understanding it. You know, if it's only happening when there's this person around, it has to be tied to the person. And then their objects are being moved, it has to be psychokinesis, being moved by the mind. And then if it's happening on a large scale and this person isn't aware that they're doing this, then clearly it is an unconscious form of PK. Mind is such a powerful thing. Scarily so. So now we're gonna get into some of the case studies that shows the link between the mind and psychokinesis. And Court's gonna start us off with the one from Enfield that we had mentioned a little bit earlier.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

This one in Enfield North London made headlines in 1977. The strange activity seemed to center around the daughter of Peggy Harper, a divorcee in her mid-40s. Again, it started on an August night. Late at night, an urban ghost story relates. Janet, aged 11, and her brother Pete, aged 10, complained that their beds were jolting up and down and going all funny. As soon as Mrs. Harper got to the room, the movements had stopped. As far as she was concerned, her kids were making it all up. But things got progressively more bizarre from there. Shuffling noises and knocks on the wall were followed by a heavy chest of drawers sliding by itself across the floor. Mrs. Harper promptly got her children out of the house and sought the assistance of a neighbor. The neighbor searched the house and garden but found no one. Soon they also heard the knocks on the walls, which continued at spaced-out intervals. At 11 p.m. they called the police who heard the knocks. One officer even saw a chair inexplicably move across the floor and later signed a written statement to confirm the events. Several people were witnesses to the events that occurred in the following days. Lego bricks and marbles were thrown around the house and were often hot to the touch. In September of that year, Maurice Gross of the Society for Psychical Research came to investigate. Gross claims that he experienced the strange happenings. First a marble was thrown at him from an unseen hand. He saw doors open and close by themselves and claimed to feel a sudden breeze that seemed to move up from his feet to his head. Gross was later joined in the investigation by writer Guy Line Playfair, and together they studied the case for two years. The knocking on walls and floors became an almost nightly occurrence. Furniture slid across the floor and was thrown down the stairs. Drawers were wrenched out of the dressing tables. Toys and other objects would fly across the room, bedclothes would be pulled off, water was found in mysterious puddles on the floors. There were outbreaks of fire followed by their inexplicable extinguishing. The case became decidedly unnerving when the spirits revealed themselves through Janet, speaking in a deep, gravelly voice. The spirit announced that his name was Bill and had died in the house, a fact that has been verified. The voices and the phenomenon have been recorded on tape and film, and Playfair has written a book about the case called The House is Haunted. Despite the documentation, however, much controversy surrounds the case. Skeptics claim that the case is nothing more than the work of a very clever and mischievous girl, Janet. Poltergeist activity always stopped when she was watched closely. And when she was taken to a hospital for several days to be tested for physical or mental abnormality, the phenomena ceased in the house. Some researchers believe that Janet taught herself to speak in the strange male voice, and that photos of her levitating in her bedroom merely caught her jumping off her bed. Was this poltergeist case just the result of an attention-seeking 11-year-old? Was those photos of her jumping? Was she like looking like she was standing or was she laying down? If I remember those correctly, it was like she was laying down, like her legs were dangling and everything. How the fuck would you do that? And at 11 years old.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

Like that's one hell of a mattress. Is it a trampoline?

SPEAKER_01 11:46

And in the 70s, you don't have AI and all this other fun stuff to work with.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

No, nor do you even have digital cameras. You just have, you know, Polaroids and standard film.

SPEAKER_01 11:56

Right. So I don't know. I feel like they're giving an 11-year-old or even 12, 13, 14-year-old a little too much credit.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

But at the same time, was anything going on in their home that maybe was causing these kids to be the PK agent? The mother just got divorced. I mean, going through a divorce, especially in the 70s, still is a, you know, difficult situation for kids, especially when they're living with their mother, because most likely she's not getting any help of any sort. Right. So that would be interesting. Kind of reminds me of the case that Ed and Lorraine Warren did in England where it was a single mom. Yep. And I'm wondering if that isn't a similar, if it isn't the same one, because she was also experiencing moving of objects. It was in England. She was speaking in a male's voice. They contributed it to a spirit in the house who is male and almost like she was becoming possessed. And that is another question, maybe to raise as we talk PK. Is maybe possession, emotional turmoil turned inward and expressed through. Oh. Yeah. Do you know where I'm going? Yeah. Yeah. That's a deep thought for today. Oh. We're gonna just let that one sit and we're gonna keep going here. No kidding, that's almost too deep. So our next case takes place in Florida.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

Cool figure.

SPEAKER_00 13:10

This one actually took place in 1967 at a souvenir warehouse known as Tropication Arts. This location would become the site of strange events. There was a peculiar increase in the incident of items breaking. As the weeks went on, amber colored beer mugs, highball tumblers, sailfish-shaped ashtrays, rubber alligators, plastic binoculars, zombie drinking glasses, back scratchers, and other things flew or fell off the shelves. Probably because nobody needs to buy that shit at the souvenir store. I like how it's just array of everything. They didn't random as shit. Right. It became apparent that this only happened when a 19-year-old shipping clerk, Julio Vasquez, was around. Initially, co-workers blamed him for what was happening. And Julio, man, he resented the accusations. Yet no one could prove trickery. Talk of a ghostly haunting began to circulate among the employees. Academic parapsychologists who researched the mechanisms of alleged psychical phenomena were invited to investigate the strange object movements. They were experts on such strange physical events, popularly known as poltergeists. The parapsologists observed what was going on, measured distances and directions in which objects moved, and mapped out the physical manifestations in relation to the people who were present. They posited that the events were somehow directly linked to Julio. He was invariably present when objects moved. There also appeared to be an emotional connection. Before things happened, Julio was tense. After an object moved, he felt relieved. One day, as Julio placed a toy alligator on a shelf, he joked to the parapsychologist William Rohl, I'll make magic. Well then. Thinks really highly of himself. Right? At that moment, a zombie glass unexpectedly fell off the shelf behind him. Another time, Rohl was watching Julio approach him with a broom in his hand. I hope something fall down, Julio said. I guess his English isn't the best. And a beer mug fell. Such evidence of mind over matter suggested that the potential for psychokinetic control, moving objects at a distance, could be developed from poltergeist cases. What turmoil in Julio's life could possibly have caused this emotional distress that would then lead to psychokinetic activity? Well, for example, Julio endured upheavals in his life as a refugee, separated from his family in Cuba. And before the poltergeist events began to begin, he admitted to people that he had been feeling suicidal. Poor Julio.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Alright, Court, what do we have next? I've got the Thornton Heath. In the 1970s, we've got Thornton Heath, England. A family was tormented by poltergeist phenomena that started one August night. There's August again. What is going on with Augusts? When they were woken in the middle of the night by a blaring bedside radio that somehow turned itself on, that's usually the alarm guys, tuned to a foreign language station. This was the beginning of a string of events that lasted nearly four years. A lampshade repeatedly was knocked to the floor by unaided hands. During the Christmas season of 1972, an ornament was hurled across the room, smashing into the husband's forehead. I could say so much. As he flopped into an armchair, reports haunted Croydon, the Christmas tree began to shake violently. Come the new year, and there were footsteps in the bedroom when there was no one there. And one night the couple's son awoke to find a man in old-fashioned dress staring threateningly at him. The family's fear grew when as they entertained friends one night, there was loud knocking at the front door. The living room door was then flung open, and all the lights came on. Having the house blessed failed to rid the house of the phenomena. Objects flew through the air, loud noises were heard, and the family would sometimes hear a noise which suggested some large piece of furniture had crashed to the floor. When they went to investigate, nothing would be disturbed. A medium who was consulted told the family that the house was haunted by a farmer of the name of Chatterton, who considered the family trespassers on his property. An investigation bore out the fact that the Chatterton had indeed lived in the house in the mid-18th century. Chatterton's wife now joined in causing mayhem, and often the tenant's wife would be followed up the stairs at night by an elderly gray-haired woman wearing a pinafore and with her hair tied back in a bun. If looked at, she would disappear back into the shadows. The family even reported seeing the farmer appear on their television screens wearing a black jacket with wide-pointed lipels, high neck shirt, and black cravit. After the family moved out of the house, the poltergeist activities cease, and none have been reported by subsequent residents.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

So the family that was experiencing the activity, once they moved, nobody else had that same activity.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Correct. But now this one just seems more like pissed off ghosts than PK activity.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

I don't know. Because if it's pissed off ghosts, it would be pissed off with everybody.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

Well, what did this family do? It almost reminds me of the Bell Witch. How so? Like once everybody moved out of the Bell Witch house, everything was fine.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

Right. But if you look at the Bell Witch story, there was trauma involved in the family at the time. Oh, there was trauma for sure. So the question becomes with this family, where's the trauma? That's a good point. And that's not always something that's discussed because, well, at that point in time, that's not what they were looking at. But I would imagine there was most likely some form of trauma going on in this family that brought this upon them, which is true for a lot of the paranormal investigating we do. Oh, for sure. So our next case study brings us to Tina Rush. Her real name is Christina Elena Rush. And this occurred back in the 1980s. So here's the deal on Tina. She was born in Columbus, Ohio on October 26th, 1969. And 10 months later, 10 months only, her mother brought her to a hospital and then disappeared. That same day, she was placed in the home of John and Joan Resch, longtime foster parents who had cared for over 250 children.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

Oh my gosh, those are sweet people. You know, that makes me think, are those like one of those people that has like a whole wall of like all the pictures of the kids they took care of?

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Probably. But get this although they had five children of their own, holy shit, they adopted her. She was a happy child with a bubbly personality. However, sometimes she boiled over. That's in quotes. At age eight, she was diagnosed as hyperactive and placed on medication. Sounds about right. Yeah. 1980s. Teachers told John and Joan that she threw erasers and pencils, causing a scene. Increasingly, they never saw her do so, but they were certain that she was behind it. Wait. What? She claimed that they made a big deal about taking her out of the room and giving her medicine. Her schoolmates made fun of her and called her crazy. The cruelty at school only worsened. John and Joan finally took Tina out of there when her schoolmates actually tied her up and taunted her terribly on the playground.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

You know, if Carrie wasn't already been made, I would have been like, this is the making of Carrie.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

This is the inspiration for, yeah, absolutely. She did her schoolwork at home and had a private tutor. Initially, things went well. She thrived at home and enjoyed helping take care of her foster siblings. However, subconsciously, she was under a great deal of stress. She spent almost her entire time at home and rarely left. On Saturday, March 3rd, 1984, Joan was washing dishes when she noticed her analog clocks hands spinning out of control. Just needs battery. The lights in the kitchen began turning on and off by themselves. Check the circuit breaker. At first, she assumed that Tina was pulling a prank. Then the TV and microwave turned on by themselves. After that, the garbage disposal did so.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

Oh, that one always scares me. I fucking hate my garbage disposal.

SPEAKER_00 20:45

I'm like, please don't. Tina tried to turn the TV off, but the picture and sound were still there. When she unplugged it, it was still working. Okay. I had this happen to me as a kid. I unplugged a radio that did not have any batteries in it. And it after it turned on by itself and it kept working.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

Okay, that shit's going in the garbage.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

In the laundry room, the washing machine started spinning quickly on its own. Joan then believed that power surges were affecting the appliances. Good job, Joan, for looking for practical ideas of what could be happening. She could be on the team. She could. When John returned from running errands, things were still running haywire. Joan told him about everything turning on by itself. He decided to call electrician Bruce Cleggett. Bruce heard a loud howling sound through the phone. He could barely hear what John was saying. When he arrived, he went to the breaker box, took the cover off, inspected the breakers, and made sure that there weren't any hot spots or loose joints. He could find no explanation for what was occurring in the house. As soon as Bruce walked outside, the activity began to act up again. A light and its switch apparently turned on by itself. Bruce, however, suspected that Tina was pulling a prank. He decided to test it by putting tape on all Of the light switches in the living room. He and John then went back to the one by the front door. However, they waited in the wrong place. The hall lamp turned on by itself, and the tape holding the switch down was gone. How old was this girl again? Uh, she was born in 1969, and it was 1984. So guess what? She's a teenager by this time. I was gonna say, cuz how much are they giving this girl credit for? But all right. Early teenager. Okay. Yeah, which would make sense. So we have the tape holding the light switch down, being gone, and Bruce was unable to explain what happened. He left soon after. Weird. Lucky guy. Later that day, more unexpected occurrences affected the house. As John fed one of the babies in her high chair, it began to move on its own. I'm assuming the high chair, not the baby. Not the baby. Where are you going, child? At the same time, Tina was pushed out of her chair and thrown onto the floor. Seconds after that, a glass was thrown across another room. Within a few hours, the room was full of broken glass. Coasters and other objects were also scattered on the floor.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

You know, I never understood that why the PK agent always went after the breakables? Well, that. But the person that is supposedly creating the agent.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

True. With no end of the havoc in sight, Tina decided to go out for a walk. Suddenly everything inside stopped and seemingly returned to normal. All I can picture is birds in the clouds. Storm clouds party. Joan began to wonder if other things that Tina got blamed for during her childhood were actually out of her control, such as the erasers and pencils being thrown in her classroom. That night, when she returned home, it became clear to her that she, Tina, was at the center of whatever was plaguing her house. She recalled waking up and seeing her analog clocks' hands moving on their own again. The next morning, the same activity continued. More glasses were thrown from counters. Oh, there was more still? Surprisingly. Yeah, I didn't get all of them, I guess. Eggs sitting in the curtain were thrown onto the ceiling. When Tina put them back in the refrigerator, one somehow passed through the door and splatted on a nearby wall. Say what? I'll read that again. When Tina put them back in the refrigerator, one somehow passed through the door and splatted on a nearby wall. Okay. You I'm rarely speechless, but shit. Yeah. John and Jones suspected that a demonic entity was causing the problems in their house. Remember how we were just talking a little while ago about possession, you know, demonic possession, especially. There we go. So their minister attempted to cleanse the house and Tina herself of evil spirits. The power of Christ compels you.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

Again, all I can think of is Carrie.

SPEAKER_00 24:40

Yeah. I'm gonna wash your sins away. She became convinced that something evil was possessing her. She isn't Tina. When John, Joan, and their minister went into the living room, a couch moved forward and hit their minister in the leg. He told them that there was nothing else he could do. He's like, I'm out. He says the bizarre occurrences in Tina's physical condition worsened. Doctors, however, could find nothing wrong with her. Desperate for help, Joan called reporter Mike Harden, who had done a story on her and John earlier. He brought along photographer Fred Shannon. Tina, Mike, and Fred went into the living room to talk. Suddenly, an Afghan that was laying on the floor lifted up and covered Tina's head. Afghan as in blanket, not as in dog. Okay. Fred brought his camera to his face and kept his finger on the trigger, hoping to take a photograph of poltergeist's activity. After about 20 minutes, Fred's arms became so tired, so he had to set his camera on his lap. And suddenly the phone next to Tina was thrown across her and landed on the floor next to her. Fred was able to quickly take a photograph as it went across her lap. It appeared that whatever entity was in the house did not want its photograph taken.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

I feel that.

SPEAKER_00 25:50

Mike noted that he did not see Tina throw the phone or anything to cause what happened. The photograph became famous, and we will share this on our Paranormal Coffee Hour page. We did not share it in our live though. So those of you who came to the live are gonna have to look at the Paranormal Facebook page to see it. The photograph became famous and Tina quickly became a media sensation. Several reporters descended on the house, many of them skeptical. One of the reporters and his crew caught her in the middle of hoaxing an episode. A video camera recorded her pulling on a lampshade and knocking it off the table. She claimed that the reporters told Joan that they would not leave unless they saw something. She then decided that she would knock over the lamp and blame it on the poltergeist. So she does this, claiming that she just wants the reporters to go, but now it calls into question everything else that she's experiencing. Right. That's unfortunate. When Tina explained her reasoning, many still believed her. Mike called in noted parapsychologist William Roll to investigate her and her apparent psychokinesis. He claimed that for the first three days he was there and nothing happened. And on the fourth day, he and Tina were in her room when a mug was thrown across it. He noted that she was too far away to have any contact with the mug. He now believed that something real was happening in the house. During another incident, Dr. Roll heard a crashing sound behind him in the master bedroom. They went in there and found a painting lying on the floor. As they tried to put it back up, his tape recorder was thrown across the room. Then a pair of pliers they were using was also. Ooh, it's getting nasty now. Dr. Roll was convinced that the house needed to be investigated further. He also believed that Tina needed some help and counseling, and she went with him to North Carolina for testing. Dr. Roll believed that Tina was unusually susceptible to electrical energy. A magnetic form in the Earth's atmosphere may have triggered an ability to inadvertently manipulate the physical environment. Oh, we have had that.

SPEAKER_01 27:43

When one of our friends, when she blew up her phone, was it her phone or was it her microwave?

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Oh yes. Yes, that's right. Now, he believed that the occurrences in the house represented Tina's inner turmoil. Joan believes that the energy in her kept building up until it exploded. Tina's symptoms and the psychokinetic occurrences eventually subsided. However, her emotional scars remained. She fears that people will continue to judge her for her craziness and alleged abilities. Which is probably not wrong. Now, here's the interesting thing. In 1986, Tina was kicked out of John and Joan's home. That's sad. She would later marry and divorce twice, changing her name. Unfortunately, both of her husbands were violently abusive towards her. So more trauma. She also had a three-year-old daughter. In 1992, she began dating a 28-year-old, and on April 14th, her daughter was found dead in a trailer in Georgia. What the f she had suffered from blunt force trauma and also had other injuries which suggested she had been abused for several days. That is sad. Yeah. There's more though. The fatal injuries occurred while she was being watched by Tina's boyfriend. He and Tina, then 22, were arrested and charged with her murder. Both claimed that the other one was responsible for her death. In October of 1994, Tina entered a plea to aggravated battery and felony murder, and she was sentenced to life in prison. I wonder what that prison's like. Yeah. So here's the thing. In 2019, Tina was still in prison. Her boyfriend, however, had been released in 2011. Say what? From this same crime. She was denied parole in 2019. She's still there. What the hell? Yeah. So, Courtney, what's our next case that we've got here?

SPEAKER_01 29:34

I don't know if I can top that one, unfortunately, but I have it's called the Danny Poltergeist case. In 1998, Jane Fishman, a reporter for the Savannah Morning News, began a series of articles about a possibly haunted antique bed in the home of Al Cobb of Savannah, Georgia. Cobb bought the vintage late 1800s bed at an auction as a Christmas present for his 14-year-old son Jason, a purchase he later regretted. Three nights later, Fishman reported. Jason told his parents he felt as if someone had planted elbows on his pillow and was watching him and breathing cold air down the back of his neck. He felt sick. The next night he noticed the photo of his deceased grandparents on his wicker nightstand flipped down, so he righted it. The next day the photo was facing down again. Well, nobody wants to see them, I guess. Later that morning, after leaving his room for breakfast, he returned and found in the middle of his bed two beanie babies, the zebra and the tiger, next to a conch shell, a dinosaur made of shells and a plaster toucon bird. Hmm, that's weird. That got his parents and his twin brother, Lee's attention, trying to make sense of the irrational. Al called out, Do we have a Casper here? Tell me your name and how old you are. Then he left some lined composition paper and crayons, and with his family walked out of the room. I love that he left the crayons. In 15 minutes, they returned and found written vertically in large black childlike letters. Danny, seven. With his family out of the house, Al Cobb decided to continue trying to communicate with the spirit of Danny. With the same kind of notes, Danny indicated that his mother had died in that bed in 1899 and that he wanted to stay with the bed. He also made it clear that he didn't want anyone else sleeping in it. The same day they found a note reading, No one sleep in bed. Jason, who had moved out of the room, decided to stretch out and pretend to take a nap. That, says Al, was a mistake. I doubled back in the room to pick up my clothes, remembers Jason, when this terracotta head that had been hanging on the wall came flying through the room, just missing me before it smashed on the closet door. No one really knows, Fishman writes in her second installment, who or what is leaving the copiaus notes, moving the furniture, opening the kitchen drawers, setting the dining room table. I mean, cool, if you're gonna set the dining room table. Yeah, clean dishes too. Flipping over the chairs, lighting the candles, arranging the posters to spell out a person's name, Jill, then hanging the finished product on a bedroom wall. Jason also spoke of other spirits. Uncle Sam, who had come to reclaim his daughter, he said was buried under the house. Gracie, a young girl whose sculpture sits in Bonaventure Cemetery, and Jill, a young woman who left a number of handwritten messages among them, one inviting the cobs to a party in their living room. Okay, pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00 32:03

So let me see if I understand this. The bed comes into the house, which we've talked about possessed objects. Right. Especially when we talk to haunted dolls. Yep. I can understand. Okay, maybe there's something attached to the bed, but it's not just the bed. Like it's not just the spirit that's attached to the bed. It's like all these different spirits now.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

Yeah, it's more like Jason's a beacon than a thing, is my take on this. Parapsychologist Andrew Nichols, head of the Florida Society for Parapsychological Research, investigated the case. What happened at the Cobbs, he told Fishman, more specifically to Jason, would have happened without Danny or the bed. It was the electromagnetic energy of the wall that Jason started sleeping next to when they moved the bed there. That charged a psychic ability that the boy already had. Oh, look, there it is.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

Also makes me wonder though, you know, was family members were they seeing some of this happening also with him? I don't know. Okay. Because this is a case where, you know, especially when we have stuff moving and it's consistently happening, okay. This might be not PK, but there's always the question of they have the bed against the wall, charged electrical. I get that, seen that happen. But what was going on with Jason? Yeah. What was going on with Jason? Why was he now suddenly so susceptible? Was it just the electrical, you know, charging him, or was there more going on that isn't discussed? Why was he awakening to his abilities all of a sudden?

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Right. Those are all good questions. Nobody answers these questions.

SPEAKER_00 33:30

You know, I saw ghosts for years as a kid, but what really triggered my activity was trauma. Right. And that's true for most people. So yeah, what's going on with Jason? We want to know. Fucking trauma. So our next case takes us to Romania, actually. Love Romania. This is a case of a 12-year-old Romanian girl named Eleanor Zugin. She was known as the poltergeist girl. And she was literally rescued from persecuting neighbors who thought she was a witch in league with the devil. Of course. Now, this one actually goes back quite a ways. This goes back to the mid-1920s. Eleanor's case began when she was staying with her grandparents in a Romanian village. She had many missiles, mainly stones, fall at her feet. The simple peasants thought that the girl was bewitched or possessed by the devil or Draku, as the locals call him, aka think of Drakuula. Yep. With many manifestations continuing, she stayed with her parents' neighbor, where they threatened to put her in an asylum. Oh my lord. Priests conducted masses and exorcisms, and university researchers conducted experiments at this asylum, and they also conducted them with Eleanor. But her phenomena still occurred. Certain papers declared that the whole thing was a swindle. Others were convinced that Eleanor was mad. While those newspapers, which had investigated for themselves, said the phenomena was genuine. However, the girl was declared insane and was incarcerated in the local asylum, where she was confined alone in a dark room. Treatment comparable with the witchcraft persecutions of the 17th century. Romanian priests had failed to quell the diabolism. The local press and psychiatric doctors became the authorities that determined Eleanor's fate. So when the case made it to the German language press, cyclical researcher Fritz Grunwald investigated and convinced Eleanor's father to remove her from the asylum. After three weeks observing Eleanor at a convent, Grunwald returned to Berlin to compile his findings and died. Oh boy. I don't know what to say about that. Eleanor was once again then at the mercy of villagers. The Countess Wallis Wassilko Sirecchi, a Romanian residing in Vienna, rescued and adopted Eleanor to advance psychical research into her case. She invited Price, who is a well-known investigator, to investigate in April of 1926. In September, Price moved Eleanor to London. He wrote, Eleanor looked even more robust than when I saw her in the previous spring. And although she was now turned 13 years of age, there was no sign of the Menzies. So she still didn't hear her period. Yeah, didn't it? The reason this was brought up, okay, it's not just because he was a creep. Price believed that puberty was central to the idea of the relationship between living people and the poltergeist. Again and again in his research through the 30s and 40s, he would encounter youths, both boys and girls, at the brink of puberty or just having entered puberty. Price argued that while young girls were so often at the center of these cases, they were usually not consciously being deceptive. One can always tell were the genuine phenomena and the spurious begin. He reiterated. Though we know that there is this connection to puberty and their sex, we cannot explain it. Price also wrote about the famed 1978 poltergeist case involving Esther Cox of Amherst, Nova Scotia, where manifestations started just after her boyfriend attempted to rape her in the woods. She resisted, he fled. So Price is convinced there must be something either psychological or physiological in a young girl's organism that turns her into a girl witch or poltergeist attractor. Oh, well, okay. Price widely popularized this line of thinking that a pubescent girl was typically a poltergeist agent. And then the idea was further cemented in popular consciousness through Stephen King's novel Carrie. But Price was onto something, I think, because you look at this young girl and we see when there's hormone changes, which puberty is a huge hormone change for people. Yes. That the hormone changes can oftentimes not only cause trauma in some families. Some of us are headed in a menopause. Trauma, they cause things to change, energy in that human being to change. Correct. So I don't think he was wrong. I just don't think his connection was quite right, where he says that they're, you know, at that point in time that they're more connected to a poltergeist. I think they're more connected to the energy, or their energy is shifting, and that's what's causing that poltergeist activity. Just my own thought there. So as we've looked at some of these cases, some are very clearly linking poltergeist activity to trauma and issues in the emotional state of the agent. Others, we're still uncertain. So as we look at this, there's three aspects to consider towards psychokinesis. There's the psychological aspect. RSPK agents tend to find themselves in adverse psychological situations, places or events that they may be unable to cope with via conventional means. Studies found that hostility and the RSPK agent, which cannot be expressed in normal ways, the main target for the anger being people with whom he or she is associated with on a daily basis. So, kind of like somebody who feels unsafe expressing their emotions to someone else who is, you know, think of Tina and her relationships that she had with people. How do I not have a PK? I know. That is a good question. The real question, though, is what is the trigger that sets off so very few individuals, turning them into PK agents? Courtney would like to know this because she wants to have her PK. And what is in the psychological or physical makeup that can cause such gross violations of the laws of physics? So if you're gonna be triggered, what are you able to do that can actually go against what we know in physics? There's also this neurological aspect. Studies have shown that many RSPK agents show medical or psychological problems. These include seizuring or disassociative states. Damn it. Symptoms that include muscle contractions, convulsions, fainting spells, coma, trances, and seizures. Some of the symptoms of epilepsy. Tourette's syndrome related to sudden, brief, and repeated electrical discharges within brain neurons. Findings suggest that RSPK may be correlated with disturbances of the central nervous system. So the relationship between being an RSPK and your central nervous system disturbances, here we go, both peak in your adolescent and teenage years. So we go back to Price's idea of the adolescent. They can equally affect males and females. It occurs repeatedly over time and involve brief displays of energy. Both can be triggered spontaneously or in response to arousal, and both can represent expressions of an emotional state. It is believed that when RSPK happens, a neuroelectric discharges within the central nervous system may somehow become blocked within the body and are instead reflected in the surrounding environment. So it's like if you plug, you know, the hose and you have another like a little nick in the hose, it's gonna go out that way. It's gonna have to come out somehow.

SPEAKER_01 41:15

But so it usually happens with younger, preteen, teenage people, but it can happen with older people.

SPEAKER_00 41:21

It can. It's just not as common. Goals.

unknown 41:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:26

When agents cannot deal with their central nervous system disturbances through the conventional way of expressing psychosomatic symptoms like headaches, vomiting, seizures, then perhaps the RSPK. So that reoccurring spontaneous psychokinesis takes their place as the outlet. So basically, once your central nervous system gets blocked, maybe that's when PK activity starts kicking up. And you know, what is it that makes it blocked? Oh, it's not being able to express your symptoms in a conventional way. Shit, maybe I'm healthier than I thought mentally. Son of a bitch. So that, folks. So we come to the end of Paranormal Coffee Hours, PK agents, and poltergeists, and we're left with probably more questions, and Courtney's left with more wondering of how on earth does she become a PK agent than I think any of us thought. But I think there's one common thing that this podcast topic has taught us therapy. We all need therapy. It's awesome, let me tell you. My therapist loves me. And if you're not getting therapy, you're running the risk of breaking shit with your mind. Can't afford that. So on that note, keep it weird. Keep it wonderful. And keep it woo.